Igor did not tell Francesco that his family appeared to him, his parents, his wife, his children, all. Why did he omit this? Because Igor did not want Francesco to feel guilty for taking him away? Perhaps even guilty enough to return him to that wet, gray place?
THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE BEHIND AND THE DISTANCE AHEAD
The beautiful baby grew and shrank at the same time. His bones insisted on lengthening. They extended themselves out in every direction, but on top of them the flesh thinned, leaving the shape of his optimistic skeleton exposed.
Solomon did not grow any new inches. His body had nothing to hold on to. I felt my rivers dry up when the boys went to drink from them.
“We have to keep moving,” I said, “we have to find something to eat.”
Solomon and I took turns holding the baby. The earth was either dry and dusty or wet and sucking—all the puddles thick with tadpoles. We took roads sometimes if the compass pointed that way, but worried that we would be seen. We took paths through the woods where pine needles made a thick perfume. We followed streams, valleys, ridges. We had come to and crossed the first mountain range. We had descended and snaked the valley. Always, there was a new landscape through which to draw a path. Always, the tiny red arrow. Never did we know where we were. Dirt stuck to our legs, to our hair, buried itself in the pores of our skin. It attached itself to us as if we could save it, take it somewhere better. When we came to a river we held on to reeds and floated in it, tried to be at home. When we came to a forest, we ate the bark of the trees and the meat of the grass and sometimes the bodies of rabbits caught and discarded by birds. Some rabbits were undressed, skinless and small. We passed farmhouses hidden behind groves of trees, farmhouses with doors to keep the cold out and windows to let the light in. Life busied itself inside, knowing nothing of the mother and sons tangled together under an abandoned appleless apple tree.
Solomon made fires, but only in nighttime to keep the giveaway smoke out of the air. Warming ourselves, I asked, “What do you think they are doing at home?”
“Sitting in the barn,” Solomon said, rocking the baby on his lap. He was as dutiful as a father.
“You are only four years old,” I said to him, which I meant as an apology. He squinted at me. To Solomon, this is what it felt like to be a little boy. A stolen father, a long escape, the outcome still unknown.
I wanted to ask if everyone’s throats were slit open. I wanted to ask if they had their own kitchen knives in their chests. I wanted to ask if they had all been led to the river and drowned together. I had a small wish for one of these stories to be true, the smallest wish, only for the sake of knowing I had not picked my children out of the rich earth for nothing.
“What else have we forgotten?” Solomon asked.
“When I was young I wrote a list of everything I knew,” I told him and this made him feel better. He wanted another of the lists but since we had no paper we had to try and remember it.
“River, rain, leaves, bark, dress, scarf, sun, dirt, mud, mother, son, son,” I started.
“Father, house, temple, stars, stars, stars,” Solomon continued. “God,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“God,” he said again. He started to talk about the weeks before we left, a time that seemed as if it belonged to other people. He tried to remember the prayers, blessed a loaf of bread he did not have, a glass of wine he did not have, a candle he did not have, a day of rest he did not have.
“I used to know how to pray,” Solomon remembered.
“You still do. Bless the path,” I said, “ahead of us.” Solomon put the name of God all over the path, paved it with that name, so that every place we put our feet would be soft with it.
“Bless the wheat,” I said, and he blessed it, hung prayers from all its blowing leaves.
“Bless us,” I told him and he put his hands on the baby’s head, his hands on his mother’s head, which I bent to meet him.
“I can’t remember anything else,” he said.
“Horse, street, lamb, baby, day, night, day.”
“Wheat,” he said, looking around him at the dark fields, “wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat.”
Each night Solomon slept a little less. At first he woke up suddenly from terrible dreams, but soon sleep was such a thin membrane that all it took to break it was a gust of wind, an animal crackling in the branches, his empty stomach.
We dried the tears rolling out of our blistered feet. I chewed leaves and grass to make a paste for our cuts. I licked the bruises on Solomon’s knees like a mother cat, clearing in this way the rotten dirt that seemed to be growing out of his skin.
We soaked more bark of trees in rainwater caught and saved.
We relieved rabbits of their skin, roasted them. We dug roots from the musky ground and ate them whether they looked familiar or not.
We stole potatoes if we found them, carrying as many as we could in my shawl. The baby sucked on his fingers, which were chapped and pitted things. His length increased alone.
With a spine of mountains blue in the distance ahead and a low roll of hills gray with cold behind, the compass pointed us into a pine forest, where we came upon the carcass of a horse. Everything was gone from it, eaten by another animal. It was a sheet of skin and the eyes, yet we knew it unmistakably as a horse. We tore the skin up with rocks, put it over a fire. It did not break up in our mouths. The skin was leather, it was fur, and we ate it.
The baby waved his arms and I praised him.
When we tried to sleep hidden in the heavy brush of the forest, a thick but sharp layer of pine needles to hold us, Solomon rubbed my back. He hushed me the way I should have hushed him.
“You should sleep,” I said.
He told me, “You’re doing great, we’re doing great. We had meat today. The baby is still the baby.” He drew pictures on my back with his finger. “What’s this?” he asked. I shrugged and he said, “Guess.”
I said, “A mouse?”
“No, it’s me.”
“Do it again,” I told him.
“How old am I?” Solomon asked.
“You’re big. You’re growing,” I said. “How old am I?”
“You are all the way grown.”
All through the lit parts and the darkened parts, I asked myself, “Where am I?” I asked myself, “Where should I be?” I wondered if our village was safe, warm, completely normal, and only I was lost and battered. Or maybe everyone was sliced through and the whole village was full only of ghosts. Was Igor home now? Was Igor dead? Were the blankets still stretched tight over our beds, waiting patiently to be dreamed in?
The air started to ache with cold and I knew we had to find a place to be warm. Solomon put a sharp rock in his pocket and stood up to go. He tried to carry the baby but he was heavy. I tried to carry the baby but he was heavy. Solomon took him, held him close, the baby put his hand to Solomon’s chest, felt for a breast.
“No,” Solomon said, “I’m not your mother.” The baby started to cry.
“You can’t cry,” I said, kneeling on the ground, my face to his. “You cannot cry. It is impossible. Do you understand me?” The baby stopped mid-phrase, he did not finish even one more shriek. “Close your eyes and be light,” I told him. “See if you can make yourself weigh nothing at all.”
THE BOOK OF THE SEA AND THE NIGHT
Eventually some of the girls came to watch the checkers game, even drank the wine. They were named things like Mariza and Mila and Francesca. They tossed their hair.
“You have so much hair,” Igor said to Carolina, sitting next to him.
She looked at him with her head aslant. Igor felt something related to delight. He touched her hair and she bent her head to let him. “Nice,” he said, not thinking of anything else to call it. “Very nice.” The men laughed at him.
“You can touch it all you want,” Carolina whispered into his ear.
“Very nice,” Igor repeated.
“I can wrap you up in it,” she whisper
ed.
“Okay.” He smiled.
“You can kiss it,” she said.
But when he kissed, the hair disappeared from under his lips and was replaced with other lips. The two pairs of lips adored each other. They matched and they knew it. Everyone around clapped and cheered but Igor pulled away. He could not believe how different those lips were from his wife’s, lips he could absolutely not kiss now, so impossible was that kiss that it made his stomach hurt. He could not describe the difference, like trying to explain the scent of apple blossoms against the scent of lilacs. “I have a wife,” Igor said. The men laughed. “I was only planning to kiss the hair.”
“Okay,” Carolina said, offering the side of her head. “Have it your way.”
Later, standing in the doorstep of the jail under a yellow bug-fluttered light, Francesco said, “You’re not in charge of your fate. Your wife cannot be upset.”
“My wife,” Igor said.
“It is not for you to decide. Here on the island, when someone wants to love you, what choice do you have?”
“If I sent a letter, would my wife get it?”
“A letter, to your wife?”
“I want that. I think I should tell her that I am all right. Alive. What if she marries someone else?”
“Not possible.” Francesco knew all about the German soldiers, the emptied-out villages, the bodies smashed into train cars, cells.
“How long have I been here?”
Francesco tried to count on his fingers but gave up. “You have been here for many weeks,” he finally answered. “Many.”
“That’s many weeklong chances for her to forget me. She does not know that I’m alive.”
“Is she even alive?” Francesco asked. He realized his coldness right away. “She’s fine, I know she is.”
“She could not be?” Igor asked back, betraying his shock.
“They are fine, maybe they really are.”
“We have no idea. We do not know if we are alive,” he fumbled.
“I am alive and you are alive,” Francesco said. “We know that much. Carolina is alive.” The bugs crashed and crashed into the light, so certain they had found something worth finding, if only they could get closer to it.
“Stay here tonight with me,” Igor said. “It seems I have lost everything.”
Francesco was light-headed. “Yes, please,” he said.
“Did you hear me? How big is my firstborn?”
Francesco put his hand out at hip level. “Maybe like this?” He was still thinking of sleeping the night away with Igor by his side.
Igor went into the cage, where he washed his face in the small sink at the wall. Francesco closed the gate and locked the two of them inside. He curled up on his side of Igor’s bed. “I’m sorry we took you away,” he said. “But thank you, too.” Francesco had gone from doing his duty to imprisoning someone for his own benefit. He did not pray for guidance, only forgiveness.
Igor began a letter.
Dear L,
Things are pretty good with me. How are you? I hope you are well. I am being held captive in a town by the sea by a nice man named Francesco who is also my friend. Maybe someday he will come and get you too and you can live in my jail with me. It is actually very nice. I have a comfortable bed and a sink and toilet and they give me money to buy food. I am allowed out during the day. Francesco and I swim and I like to drink coffee in the square. I am learning the language.
Solomon must be big. And even the baby must be big. Do you remember me? Do you? Are you alive? Are you going to marry someone else? If you wanted to come and live here I am sure they would take you prisoner, too. There are girls here but you are my wife. Today, one of them told me she’d wrap me up in her hair, but instead I am here, writing to you. Do you even appreciate this? I have a bed from an old woman, a big old bed. I am getting to be a fast swimmer. I did not know how to swim before, any more than to hold on to the reeds in the river when we used to go together. Are you still lucky? Do you look the same? I have a new suit. Francesco and me like to lie on the warm rocks by the sea. Do you know what the sea looks like? It is very beautiful and I think you would like to go into it. I would like to show you how to swim along the shore. We could eat cheese after and walk in the sun. Do you want to see me again? Do you want me to be your husband? Does Solomon like to practice arithmetic? Is the baby as high as your knee, as high as your hip? Which of them looks more like me? Which of them looks more like you? Which of them remembers my name? Are all of our parents alive? Do you sleep alone in the bed? How are the constellations coming? Is the whole sky there now, over everyone? I would like to sleep there again. Please tell me you are alive. Please tell Solomon and the baby that I am their father. Please send a letter saying they know. I almost remember who you are.
Sincerely, I
In the morning, as Francesco was going to get his pastry and coffee, a small boat pulled up to the dock, and out of it came two soldiers, older and full-cheeked, no one Francesco knew. They wore Italian uniforms, and as they approached, they drew their hats down to their hearts. Francesco thought, They have come to take my friend. Solemnly, he met them on the wooden-planked dock. “There have been some losses,” the older of the two men said. “Giuseppe Carbone.” The face coalesced in Francesco’s mind. A younger boy, thorny and uneven, commanding a game of tag on the beach. “And Bianco,” the man said.
“But that’s me,” Francesco objected, instinct prompting him to check his own hands to see that he was alive.
“Luca Bianco.” Francesco’s oldest brother, so confident the air swirled around him, drawing everyone nearer, so much what the world had dreamed a son could be.
“He can’t die,” Francesco said, sure of this. Like that part of the contract had been renegotiated, this man too good for the world to lose.
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” the younger of the two soldiers said. “It was an ambush, in Rome. They were both brave.”
The soldiers saluted, and then they turned around and left.
For a moment, the tears in Francesco’s eyes were made of relief and thanks. Francesco had been granted a pardon. No one wanted to take Igor from him, not yet. And then, Francesco saw Luca’s shadow collapse at his feet. He, the ever-disappointing son, would have to walk this news to his mother’s doorstep, he would have to be the one to throw her heaving to the floor with it. Francesco sat down on the dock and put his head in his hands, and for a long time, nothing breathed. God was benevolent and he was cruel.
THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE AND THE FUTURE, WHICH IS NOW
The mountains, deep green and fully alive, were high around my bony children and me. We did not ascend or descend, but walked straight across the low valley of this revolving earth. On the coldest nights we slept in barns, if we found them, with the pigs and goats. The animals did not seem to feel heroic, sharing their house with refugees. They moaned and grunted and grudgingly allowed us a little corner. We whispered about our own barn and how well we had made it into a place to pray. We sneaked eggs and animal feed, chewed on the same hay the pigs slept on, but as soon as the idea of light peeked through the cracks in the walls, we left to let the new day shake us, tackle us, wring us out.
On a clear and blue afternoon in which the branches on the trees were naked but not shy for it, we came to a spectacular and strange thing—a mattress in the middle of a cleared field. The grass was dry and cut short, whatever it had been grown for gone into cooking pots and bellies. But there was this old and moldy thing, a thing once slept on by people, loved on by people. It had grass growing through it. It was a nest for new baby grasses. For this family, who had survived on whatever was found, this seemed like a gift. Solomon, slow, weak and broken-in, did not lie down but began to jump.
He was a beautiful, enthusiastic jumper. He used his whole body to propel himself upward. When he came down, the springs of his legs sent him up again. The good ground, hanging on to his ankles, did not stand a chance against all that sky.
I held the baby on my lap so we could be bounced by Solomon’s jumping. The baby laughed, a sharp and definite laugh. Maybe his first. “How long since we laughed?” I asked. We tried to keep quiet, because we never knew who was going to steal us away just for existing, but in this moment it was not easy. In this moment Solomon’s muscles began to ache from his laughter. I collapsed in my own joy, watched my son go up and down, his hair bouncing, his arms flapping, flightless.
“What are you?” I called to Solomon.
“A boy!” Solomon called back.
“No, you are jumping!” I laughed.
“I am both!” Solomon shrieked, dizzy.
I lay down in the grass beside the mattress. I put my head on a rock and covered my eyes with my hands. The sun was lost light. The sound of my shrieking and laughing boy was unmuffled. I listened to every beat of it, every landing and takeoff, every collapse and resolution to continue. Solomon slowed down, said, “I see the stars,” then collapsed on the mattress in dry heaves. He had nothing to vomit up.
My hand ran the ridge of Solomon’s spine. It hurt to cry—I had no water to spare, but my eyes had waited long enough. Solomon tried to stand, but it was too much. His legs were soft and bendy. Beaten, he lay down and wept. I told him the story of the very day we were in—once upon a time we were a family who came upon an amazing mattress in a field just like every other field and how the older brother had jumped so high he saw the stars while his mother and brother listened to the sound of his laughter with the sun on their faces.
“Don’t you remember how wonderful?” I asked.
He repeated just the last word, but it collapsed on his tongue.
The sun stopped being worth shading ourselves from. The cut field was a pincushion of interrupted growth. The baby fell asleep on the bed, and Solomon lay next to him. I went to find food and came back with a rabbit, a baby, already dead but undiscovered by birds. I skinned it, put it on a small fire and waited for the smell to wake my baby up.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 21